Physics

The last decade has seen vast improvements in humanoid robots, but graduating to widespread use might require going back to the fundamentals.

Pushed down to a certain scale, the laws of physics seem to fall apart. Astrid Eichhorn, a leader in an area of study called asymptotic safety, thinks we just need to push a little further.

Microscopic crystals extracted from meteorites could help settle a debate about the birth of our patch of the Milky Way.

Henry Yuen is developing a new mathematical language to describe problems whose inputs and outputs aren’t ordinary numbers.

Columnist Philip Ball thinks the phenomenon of decoherence might finally bridge the quantum-classical divide.

Today’s observatories document every pulse and flash in the sky each night. To understand how the cosmos has changed over longer periods, scientists rely on a more tactile technology.

Columnist Natalie Wolchover checks in with particle physicists more than a decade after the field entered a profound crisis.

A $1 million prize awaits anyone who can show where the math of fluid flow breaks down. With specially trained AI systems, researchers have found a slew of new candidates in simpler versions of the problem.

Try as they might, scientists can’t truly rid a space or an object of its energy. But what “zero-point energy” really means is up for interpretation.